h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm using gentoo in a completly 64 bit enviroment. I would suggest gentoo for x86_64 architectures because all software is compiled from source and optimised to your systems specifications. Its a bastard to install but the gentoo forums are very helpful. :D

Dan

I use gentoo in my completely 32 bit environment, and I agree with your suggestion (although Linux From Scratch would have the same advantage).

I've been quite interested by these 64 bit wonders - in your opinion, how much more powerful are they?

Well I have only really just got my amd64 up and running and haven't given it a through benchmarking. I have upgraded from a pentium4 1.2Ghz to the athlon 64 3000+ so the speed is definetly noticable to me. For example loading Gimp2.0 takes 3 seconds (the initialising plugins and loading scriptfu is done in a snap). The reason I choose x86_64 was because I plan to do alot of sound processing using the jack audio server tools. I gave up my loyalty to slackware and moved to gentoo. Portage is great. I will attempt to write an entry about 64 bit computing over the next month.

Dan